Aggregators - (Elham Naseri)
Definition of 'Aggregator' A party involved within the secondary mortgage market that purchases mortgages from financial institutions and then securitizes them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Aggregators earn profit by purchasing individual mortgages at lower prices and then selling the pooled MBS at a higher premium. Purchasing an MBS tends to be far less risky compared to purchasing an individual mortgage as the pools of mortgages diversifies the source of the individual mortgage's income stream. Some mortgage originators also become aggregators as securitizing a pool of mortgages can be seen as a natural extension of their business. Plus, doing so would limit losses incurred to the originator in the event that mortgage rates rise, as typically seen when originators would sell the mortgages into the secondary market. Aggregator refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources: *Data aggregator, an organization involved in compiling information from detailed databases on individuals and selling that information to others *News aggregator, a computer software or website that aggregates news from other news sources *Poll aggregator, a website that aggregates polling data for upcoming elections *Review aggregator, a website that aggregates reviews of movies or other products or services *Search aggregator, software that runs on a user's computer and fetches, filters, and organizes a specific search from various search engines *Social network aggregation, the collection of content from multiple social network services *Video aggregator, a website that collects and organizes online video sources. Development history The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group developed Meta Content Framework. The first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha at Netscape. It was released in March 1999. In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scripting News syndication format. This RSS technology is used widely at that time, with supporting of many big companies, such as Yahoo, Useland. In 2003, Google developed a new aggregator supporting Atom, which is a new technology developed by IBM software engineer Sam Ruby. One successful example of is Google Reader. In March 2010, Dave Winner declared that RSS and Atom will merge in the future. Features *User can get Title and Content Snippet without advertisement and images. *News reader will aggregate the content from website which user subscribed for automatically. *User can have multiple subscription from different website, and read in one news aggregation. Software-based aggregation Functions Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or personal newspaper. Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being pulled to the subscriber, as opposed to pushed with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some pushed information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed. Aggregator features are frequently built into portal sites, Web browsers, and email programs. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in one browser display or desktop application. Aggregators with podcasting capabilities can automatically download media files, such as MP3 recordings. In some cases, these can be automatically loaded onto portable media players (like iPods) when they are connected to the end-user's computer. As of 2011, so-called RSS-narrators have appeared, which aggregate text-only news feeds, and convert them into audio recordings for offline listening. The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom. For example, if there are many sites you visit frequently, without RSS the only way you can find out if anything on the sites has been updated is to go to each site individually. This can take a long time. Aggregation technology helps you to integrate these websites in one browser or page that can show the new or updated information from all the sites you choose, regardless of whether the content is text, music, pictures, or video. Customers only need to find an RSS feed on the Internet and add that in their RSS reader. There are many successful on-line RSS Readers, such as My Yahoo!, Google Reader, and Feedly. There is also a variety of RSS software: Feed Demon, and RSS Reader for example. For network security, users can choose what items can be shown in their RSS readers, like title, author or others, so it can exclude spam. Media aggregators Media aggregators are sometimes referred to as podcatchers due to the popularity of the term podcast used to refer to a web feed containing audio or video. Media aggregators refer to applications, client software or Web based, which maintain subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures. They can be used to automatically download media, playback the media within the application interface, or synchronize media content with a portable media player.